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Rob Phillips, Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology, is one of the hard-core scientists/athletes recently featured in the Caltech Magazine. In the article he is shown seeking surfing solitude in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. He describes, “I try to go places where there’s no one else. In Alaska I found a place never surfed by anybody.” He has also sought surf nirvana in Sumatra, the Maldives, Biarritz, and—closer at hand—off Carpinteria State Beach in Santa Barbara County. On the connection between sports and science, Phillips says, “One of the things I notice about the people I admire the most in science is that they’re still in touch with a childlike enthusiasm, an intensity, a curiosity.” [Read the article]

Computation and Neural Systems student Stephen Dolbier, mentored by Professor Antonio Rangel, is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. He is working on a project that uses eye-tracking to predict human decision making. This summer, he will be a data science intern at Quotient Technology Inc.. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to engineering students with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, and colleagues are now able to take a live look at the inner workings of a small animal with enough resolution to see active organs, flowing blood, circulating melanoma cells, and firing neural networks. "Photoacoustic tomography combines light and sound synergistically for high-resolution imaging of molecular contrast," says Professor Wang. [Caltech story] [Read the paper]

Kanianthra Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 2017 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award. for “for seminal contributions to distributed and parallel programming, including the development of the UNITY formalism.” The Goode Award recognizes achievements in the information processing field which are considered either a single contribution of theory, design, or technique of outstanding significance, or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended time period. [IEEE Computer Society story]

Computer science and mechanical engineering student Kun ho (John) Kim is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. John is working with Professors Burdick and Perona to develop novel machine learning methods for medical applications and crowd sourced data mining. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to the engineering student with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Electrical engineering student Avinash Agrawal, working with Professors Burdick and Low, is a recipient of the 2017 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Avinash is aiming to produce robot visualizations and simulations for a spherical robot. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to the engineering student with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Aaron Ames, Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, handbuilds bipedal robots and designs the algorithms that govern how they walk. These algorithms couple efficiency equations with boundary constraints to teach robots to generate their own walking gait. [Interview with Professor Ames]

Paul O. Wennberg, R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering, as been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. His work applies traditional physical chemistry techniques to study the mechanisms of chemical transformation in the earth's atmosphere and in the carbon cycle. This research has helped create the Total Carbon Column Observing Network, which measures the distribution of greenhouse gases across the globe. [Caltech release]

Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, and colleagues at Caltech and École normale supérieure in Paris have discovered that fast ruptures propagating up toward the earth's surface along a thrust fault can cause one side of a fault to twist away from the other, opening up a gap of up to a few meters that then snaps shut. [Caltech story]

On April 19, 2017 Electrical Engineering alumnus Evangelos Simoudis (BS '83) moderated a panel titled "The Road Ahead: A Panel on the Future of Driverless Vehicles," hosted by the Caltech Associates. The panel members were Professors Mory Gharib, Richard Murray, and Pietro Perona, along with Reuters automotive industry reporter, Paul Lienert. They discuss a variety of opportunities and challenges associated with autonomous technologies and systems. Beyond the legal and ethical challenges, several technological obstacles must be overcome before driverless cars become common on the road. One key challenge is teaching driverless cars how to read the behavior of other cars and react accordingly. Professor Perona described the problem of a car attempting to merge onto a crowded freeway. A driverless car would see an impenetrable wall of vehicles, but a human driver could edge forward and wave at other drivers to work his or her way into the line of traffic. [Caltech story]